Technology is a tricky domain, it is not easy to know what a startup will become in a year or two, or how a specific event will change the future of a company; This is why tech blogs and tech sites tend to stuff you with news some important and some are at best a waste of your time, but when a major event happens believe me, any respectable tech reporter/ blogger will know it’s big news! Whether they will focus on it or not is a completely different story!

For a weird, illogical and incomprehensible reason, the absolute majority of famous and popular tech blogs and tech news sites are siding with the MegaG (you know what i mean, it begins with Goo and ends with gle), this is visible through constant praise of MegaG’s properties and capacity, while they ignore criticize and attack Yahoo and Microsoft, and many even go further dissing anyone that is considered a competitor to MegaG (Apple, Facebook …).

Is this a case of information manipulation (are these blogs on payroll – MegaG was caught once read-handed paying tech bloggers to promote it positively)?

Or is MegaG promoting it’s supporters and hiding it’s critics – thus supporters become popular and critics remain unknown?

Or simply these Tech sites understood the game of traffic: you love MegaG, MegaG loves you back (check our other article to know the way censorship works in search)!

A couple of days ago, one of these major events happened, we held our breath, hoping it will be covered as it should by the tech news outlets and blogs, Not surprisingly, it wasn’t! It was covered much less than how it should have, instead of emphasizing the importance and the game changing aspects of the event, these fast news shops covered it very lightly as they would cover (even less) MegaG “funny” doodles!

this event was:

Yahoo adding Flickr Creative commons photos to it’s image search !

Great, what does this means ? and why is it a game changer?

The reason why people use image search is:

1) To look at explicit images (boobs and such).
2) To Find an image to use on a project.
3) To identify an object/ person etc.

All 3 search engines Bing, Google and Yahoo used to offer similar image results, some innovated (Bing) but they were caught up by the others, leading to a similar image search experience. Now all are partially censoring explicit images, so the second most important reason to choose an image search, is to find an image to use.
What would you choose, a search engine that is showing pictures from sites (it indexed = stole), but which you do not have the right to use?
Or a website that will provide images that you can reuse freely and legally (Yahoo)?

That’s the idea, Yahoo integrating Flickr images in it’s image results is adding a website with more than 6 billion images (which were uploaded to share, not personal images like Facebook or storage images like image hosting sites), from these 6 billion a big percentage is under creative common, and thus you can reuse freely, No other website except Wikimedia Foundation have such a huge number of images under creative commons.

Will increase Yahoo image search Market Share!

It’s a game changer, because it will influence the behavior of people used to search using other search engines, it will make them use Yahoo more and more often, leading to increase of Yahoo search share as well as Yahoo general traffic. On the long run there’s no doubt Yahoo will dominate the image search market.

What can be said is that Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo) is doing an amazing job, strategy wise , she is bringing the different properties of the company together towards a better user experience and company strength.

We can say: Yahoo with Marissa is rising from it’s ashes.

How to find and use these reusable images ?

Easy, go to yahoo click image search > unlike bing and Google, with yahoo you will stay on same page, just type the keyword, you will get image results as any other search engine, now check the column to your left at the bottom you will find:

Any Usage Rights

Labeled for Reuse< Click on this

Here’s some explanation by the Yahoo search team:

Click on any thumbnail and you can view the full image. To see the specific Creative Commons license terms for the image, just click the “Attribution” link. And if you want to see more photos by that specific photographer, just click the “i” and you can see the rest of their photostream on Flickr.

Hover over the thumbnail to see any details about the photo, including the photographer’s name.